Growthential"The MQL is holding most B2B organisations back. Forty-one per cent of buyers already have a vendor in mind before they start searching. Stop measuring form fills and start measuring buying signals."
Why the MQL Model Is Failing
The MQL model was built for a different era, one where buyers relied on vendors for information and the marketing team's job was to capture contact details and pass them to sales. The typical flow:
- Prospect downloads a whitepaper or attends a webinar
- Marketing scores the lead based on demographic fit and engagement
- Once the lead hits a threshold, it becomes an "MQL" and gets passed to sales
- Sales follows up, qualifies further, and (hopefully) converts
The problems with this model in 2026 are numerous:
The Buyer Has Changed
By the time a B2B buyer fills out a form on your website, they have already done significant research. They have read reviews, asked peers, queried AI tools, and formed opinions. The idea that a whitepaper download represents the start of their buying process is simply wrong. It might represent the end of it.
The data supports this: 70% of the buying journey is complete before a buyer contacts a vendor (6sense Buyer Experience Report, 2025), and 41% already have a preferred vendor before they begin formal evaluation (Forrester, 2024). Your MQL might be someone who is already buying from your competitor and just wanted to compare.
Volume Incentivises the Wrong Behaviour
When marketing is measured on MQL volume, the incentive is to generate as many leads as possible, regardless of quality. This leads to:
- Gating content behind forms that create friction for genuine buyers
- Running campaigns optimised for form fills rather than revenue
- Passing low-intent contacts to sales, who waste time following up on people who are not buying
The result: sales ignores marketing leads. Marketing blames sales for not following up. The two teams operate in mutual frustration. Sound familiar?
The Handoff Creates Friction
The MQL-to-SQL handoff is a manufactured transition. In the buyer's experience, there is no handoff. There is a continuous research and evaluation process. Forcing this process through a rigid qualification framework creates delays and disconnects.
I have seen deals lost because a high-intent buyer was stuck in a "nurture sequence" waiting to accumulate enough engagement points to become an MQL. Meanwhile, a competitor's sales team picked up the phone and had a conversation.
What Is Replacing the MQL
The shift is not from MQLs to some other single metric. It is a move toward signal-based, account-level demand measurement. In practice, that looks like this:
1. Buying Signals Over Lead Scores
Instead of scoring individual contacts based on their engagement with your content, monitor buying signals across the entire account:
- Intent data: Is the account researching topics related to your solution?
- Engagement patterns: Are multiple people from the same account visiting your site, attending events, or engaging with content?
- Trigger events: Has the account hired a new CXO, raised funding, expanded into a new market, or announced a relevant initiative?
These signals indicate that an account is in a buying cycle, which is far more useful than knowing that one person downloaded a PDF. This is the foundation of signal-based selling, which replaces spray-and-pray outbound with targeted, intent-driven engagement.
2. Account Engagement Scoring
Rather than qualifying individual leads, measure the collective engagement of an account. A buying committee typically involves 6-10 or more stakeholders (Gartner). If three people from the same account have engaged with your content in the past 30 days, that is a stronger signal than one person hitting an arbitrary lead score.
This approach aligns naturally with Account-Based Marketing (ABM), but you do not need a full ABM programme to implement it. Even basic account-level aggregation of engagement data provides better qualification than individual MQL scoring.
3. Pipeline Contribution Over Lead Volume
The most important shift is in what marketing measures. Instead of counting MQLs, measure:
- Pipeline created: How much qualified pipeline can be attributed to marketing activities?
- Pipeline velocity: How quickly do marketing-sourced opportunities move through the funnel?
- Revenue influence: How many closed deals involved marketing touchpoints?
- Customer acquisition cost: What does it cost to acquire a customer through each channel?
These metrics align marketing and sales around the same goal: revenue. When marketing is measured on pipeline rather than leads, the incentive shifts from volume to quality. I unpack this principle further in my piece on why fewer, better leads outperform high-volume approaches.
4. Self-Service and Product-Led Signals
The rise of self-service B2B buying creates new qualification signals. If a prospect signs up for a free trial, explores your pricing page, or uses your product in a limited capacity, those actions indicate higher intent than any whitepaper download.
Thirty-four per cent of B2B revenue now comes through self-service channels (McKinsey B2B Pulse Survey, 2024). If your qualification model does not account for product engagement signals, you are missing a significant portion of buying intent.
How to Make the Transition
Moving away from MQLs is not just a metrics change. It requires alignment between marketing, sales, and leadership. This is the approach I recommend:
Step 1: Align on a Shared Revenue Goal
Before changing any metrics, get marketing and sales leadership in a room and agree on a shared revenue target. Not a lead target for marketing and a close target for sales. A single revenue number that both teams own.
This is harder than it sounds. It requires marketing to accept accountability for pipeline quality, and sales to accept that marketing needs input into how leads are followed up. But without this alignment, any new model will fail.
Step 2: Define Your Buying Signals
Work with sales to identify the signals that historically correlate with deals closing. This is where a clear B2B sales strategy aligns the whole team around what matters. This will be different for every business, but common high-value signals include:
- Multiple stakeholders engaging from the same account
- Visits to pricing or comparison pages
- Attendance at product-focused (not thought-leadership) events
- Direct outreach to sales (inbound requests)
- Account-level intent data spikes
Step 3: Build an Account-Level View
If your CRM only tracks individual contacts, invest in building an account-level view of engagement. Most modern CRM and marketing automation platforms support this. The key is connecting individual touchpoints into an account-level picture.
Step 4: Transition Gradually
Do not turn off MQL reporting overnight. Run the new model alongside the old one for a quarter. Compare the signals: are high-signal accounts converting at a higher rate than high-score MQLs? (They almost certainly will be.) Use the data to build confidence in the new approach before fully transitioning.
Step 5: Retrain Both Teams
Marketing needs to learn how to create content and campaigns that generate buying signals, not just form fills. Sales needs to learn how to act on account-level intelligence rather than waiting for individual leads to be passed over.
The Mindset Shift
The deepest change is philosophical. The MQL model treats demand generation as a funnel: pour leads in the top, qualified opportunities come out the bottom. The signal-based model treats demand generation as a radar: constantly scanning the market for accounts that are in a buying cycle, then engaging them at the right moment with the right message.
This shift benefits everyone:
- Buyers get a better experience, no more being bombarded with follow-up calls after downloading a whitepaper
- Marketing focuses on creating genuine demand rather than capturing details
- Sales spends time on accounts that are actually buying rather than chasing cold MQLs
- The business sees better conversion rates, shorter sales cycles, and higher revenue per marketing dollar
Where This Leaves Us
The MQL is not dead because it was a bad idea. It was the right model for its time. But the B2B buying process has evolved beyond what the MQL framework can capture. Companies that cling to it will find themselves optimising for a metric that no longer correlates with revenue.
The replacement is not a single new metric. It is a new operating model that aligns marketing and sales around buying signals, account engagement, and pipeline contribution. For a detailed look at how to build this into a complete programme, see my full-funnel demand generation framework, or explore how I help companies with B2B demand generation. The transition takes effort, but the payoff is real.
If you are rethinking your demand generation model and want to discuss the approach, reach out.